I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it — On Writing

"Four stories. A quarter apiece. That was the first buck I made in this business."

"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. . . . Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers--common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. Ive heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."

"I dont want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldnt just stand around with your hammer in your hand."

"I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism."

"One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: "The editor is always right." The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editors advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine."

"When you write a story, youre telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."